Watching Joe Willie Namath wade through the Pittsburgh Steelers with the Lombardi Trophy right after Super Bowl XLIII brought back the true meaning of the Super Bowl even more powerfully than the game itself, which, considering the stakes, has to be considered one of the greatest football games of all time. In today's splintered popular culture, any production that puts Americans on the same page is already a remarkable show. And when the show also happens to be good on its own merits, you almost can't wait for the next one.

It's a measure of how little sympathy plays in professional football that we want to think of the Arizona Cardinals as some new franchise. We don't think of the Cardinals in terms of their deep history — we just think of them in terms of losing. And we still do. Once the Cardinals punched their ticket to the Super Bowl with a 32-25 win against the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC Championship Game, who among us said, "Well, the Cardinals must be pretty good?"

So it's two AFC North teams, Pittsburgh and Baltimore, playing for the AFC championship. One doesn't know if Bengals fans should be heartened or discouraged: Of the Bengals' 11 losses, four came against those two teams. If you're going to finish third in a division, it might as well be the division in which the top two teams are the only two left in the conference.